More Goodbyes

Tomorrow is Boo's last day at her daycare.  She'll start at Crazy's daycare when she turns two.  We've loved her teachers and she just adores them, but overall we haven't been impressed with the daycare as a whole.  Not to mention we're paying almost double for her daycare compared to the new one!  As a goodbye we ordered flowers for each of her teachers and she "wrote" them thank you/goodbye cards.  They in turn gave her a goodbye gift consisting of a baby doll, blankets for her baby, her favorite book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?", and the Barney toy she sleeps with at nap time at the daycare.  

One of her teachers sings a couple of songs to her that we don't know but Boo always requests so she graciously wrote those down for us.  One was a Scottish lullaby that she even translated for us.  For weeks Boo would ask us to sing some "Bee-baw" song and would scream hysterically when we didn't.  Well apparently it was the Scottish lullaby that she wanted.  However Boo only lets me sing the first part of the song which is more like sounds rather than words.  I don't think she recognizes the English words in the second part so she just cuts me off when I get to that part.  She seems to be happy with the first par though, at least she's not screaming at us anymore!

Update:  Hubby picked Boo up on her last day and he said that it was a tear-fest!  No one wanted to say goodbye to her and there were so many tears and hugs that he felt very uncomfortable.  He told me that if he had known that was going to happen he would have made me pick her up.  I told him to just be glad they were sad to see her go rather than throwing a party to celebrate her being gone!

Traveling Light...

I told the kids that we needed to start packing for our trip to Grandma's house and that we needed to pack only the essentials.  I explained that we wouldn't have a lot of room in the van so I needed them to share a small suitcase.  Well Crazy got really excited about packing because that meant that we would be leaving for Grandma's soon.  He offered to help pack Boo's things, you know, the important ones.

This is what he came up with:

He explained to me that Boo would have to have "Meow" (her cat lovey) while at Grandma's and that she might want more than one.  After all, it is a long way to Grandma's.  So, that's why he felt the need to pack not only "Meow" but her bobcat, her gray cat, another orange cat, another grey cat, and a teddy bear (in case she didn't feel like a cat).  He also tried to pack an extremely large Hello Kitty in the main compartment before I drew the line.  As sweet as it was for him to think of her and her stuffed animal needs, I told him the limit was two.  Fortunately he agreed, after all, I was limiting his sister's toys right then, not his (yet!).

Cats, cats and more cats!

Boo just loves her cats!

Saying Goodbye to Mr. Raincloud

It was a sad day at work when we had to bid farewell to Mr. Raincloud (no that's not his real name, by the way, he agreed to that name!)  Mr. Raincloud some what abruptly decided to retire the end of May much to my displeasure.  No amount of begging and whining on my part could convince him to stay until after we moved away.  So I sucked it up and ordered him a cake.  I have to say it turned out pretty cute. 

It's kind of hard to see but it depicts Mr. Raincloud sleeping at his computer with a comment bubble saying "Dreaming of Retirement" and another photo in the upper right hand corner showing him at "work".  Now I'm going to claim to have had no part in the taking and creating of the picture that went on the cake.  The two ladies that I work with were the ones that snuck up on him and took pictures while he was taking a little snooze.  And it was our supervisor who photoshopped the two pictures together and added the comment blurb.  I just took the photo to Wal-Mart to order the cake and then taped it up with evidence tape.  We thought about wrapping the entire cake box up in tape because Mr. Raincloud is known around the office for using EXCESSIVE amounts of tape but we figured it would take too long for him to open the box and we all wanted some cake!  Mr. Raincloud managed to show up that day (it was his day off ) and was (hopefully) pleasantly surprised to find all of us waiting for him with delicious cake.  We even managed to capture a rare smile from him.

Birthday Cake

One of the girls at work recently had her birthday so I made her a cake.  Since she spent her birthday soaking up sun at the beach I thought it would be cute to try and make her a cake that showed something to do with water or the beach.  I had bought the new cupcake book, "What's New Cupcake," a few days before and used one of their creations.  I adapted it for a cake so it sped up the time to make it because I didn't have to ice a bunch of cupcakes. The kids helped me make it and we were able to finish the decorating in about 20 minutes.  Boo even managed to add a 3rd eye to one of the people.  I personally think it came out very cute and my co-worker loved it (or so she said!).  Here's a picture of the cake:

My Growing Garden

Here's a recent picture of my extremely fast growing garden.  Can you believe how much the cucumber plants have grown? 

Here is a picture of one of the potato plants:

We have cucumbers!!!  Look how small they are.  I was so excited when I saw the first one.  Then I started looking through all the plants and found quite a lot!  Hubby asked me if every flower would turn into a cucumber (there are a LOT of flowers) and what we were going to do with all of them.  I guess we'll be eating cucumbers at every meal.

I'll post more pictures soon!  All the rain we've been getting has really been helping them grow.

Mother's Day Weekend

So my Mother's Day weekend kicked off with a less than ideal start, literally.  Friday night I managed to kick the corner of the half wall in our bathroom and broke the last joint of my fourth toe (the one next to the little toe).  Being the weenie that I am, I immediately started screaming and crying.  Hubby came to see what the fuss was about and less extremely short of comforting me.  Our conversation went something like this:

Hubby:  "What's wrong?
Me:  (sobbing) "I think I broke my toe!"
H:  "You mean you stubbed it?"
Me:  "NO!!"
H:  "What did you do?"
Me:  "I hit the wall with my foot."
H:  "You mean you kicked the wall that's always there?"
Me:  (giving the evil eye while sobbing) "No, I hit the wall that moves around!"

Shortly after this conversation took place Crazy came to see what was going on.  He then started laughing at my misery.  Needless to say that he was promptly banned from my room for the rest of the night.  Hubby still didn't believe that I broke my toe until the next morning when I described the pain I was still feeling as along the lines of my toe felt like it was giving birth.   Saturday was spent trying to rest my foot.  I did get some sympathy from Crazy when we told him that Mommy couldn't climb up into his tree house because of my broken toe.  Sunday morning (Mother's Day) I woke up to my fantastic family making me pancakes.  The kids fell over each other trying to be the first to give me their card.  Crazy picked out his card himself.  It was a birthday card showing an old man pulling a bus with is teeth.  Completely random I know but sweet that he picked it out himself.  The kids also gave me the movie Leap Year which I've been wanting to see.  When I opened Hubby's card it said that he'd signed us up for the next round of ballroom lessons!  (Almost makes up for the toe)  I've wanted to take ballroom lessons for years and he finally pulled through and signed us up!  I've got the best husband ever!!  Eight weeks of dance lessons!  We start sometime in June so stand by for those posts.  The rest of Mother's Day was spent hobbling around the outlet mall in Destin.  So even though "my" weekend started out terrible, it ended on a high note thanks to my terrific family! 

Our Little Lion

So for the past 4 days or so I've had a terrible headache that just won't go away.  On top of that my throat feels, and looks, terrible.  I spent the whole weekend in bed miserable.  A trip to the base clinic determined that I do not have strep throat but an unknown virus.  So today after taking large quantities of Advil I started to feel a little better.  What's a person to do after feeling horrible for so long and is now feeling better?  Well if you're me, you shave your long-haired cat.  Yes, you read that right.  It was time for our cat, Tator's, semi-annual haircut.  Apparently feeling bad for days on end makes one ignore the large orange clumps of cat hair that is scattered around ones' house.  Well it came to an end today and I have pictures to prove it!

Here's a "before" picture of Tator with my little helpers:

And here are the "after" shots:

The kids, cat, and I were all crammed into the kids' bathroom while I shaved him.  At first Crazy did a great job of picking up all the hair as I cut it off but he quickly got tired of that once he realized how much hair that involved.  Towards the end the cat was stressed and my headache was coming back.  But after a trash bag of hair, half of which Crazy dumped on my head, we were finished and we now have our own little lion.  Crazy loved the idea of watching his show "Between the Lions" with his own lion by his side.  Now I don't have to worry about shedding and every time we see him, he brings a smile to our faces.